What if you got behind the wheel of a car without ever having taken a lesson?

That is what all of us did with AI. You got a login and you were on the road. Nobody made you prove anything.

So say there was a test. Here is what would be on it.

Coming PLACEHOLDER: link to the New York Times Daily episode about an AI license. Chris is sending it.

What would you learn?

  1. It will tell you you're right.

    AI is your partner, not your judge. It agrees with you, and agreement is how average work gets published.

  2. It predicts. It doesn't know.

    Confident writing is not the same as true writing, and it will not tell you when it is unsure.

  3. You own what you send.

    However it got made, your name is on it.

  4. Some things you should still do badly yourself.

    Outsource the thinking and you lose the skill you were hired for.

  5. Most AI isn't in a chat box.

    Hiring, insurance, what you get recommended. AI you cannot see is a decision being made about you.

  6. It's going to go wrong. Go again.

    The people who get value from this are not the ones it went smoothly for.

Every one of these is an improv skill.

Which shouldn't be a surprise, because look at what's actually happening. It's two of you in a room, playing off each other, building something neither of you brought in.

The other one is a robot.

It'll accept anything you give it. It never breaks the scene to say it doesn't know. It builds on your worst idea as eagerly as your best one, because that's what a scene partner does. That isn't a flaw. That's the behavior working exactly as designed.

Which is why the scene needs someone with a point of view. That was never going to be the robot.

Nobody's going to issue this license. So you give it to yourself, and the test is whether the work you put your name on is better than what you'd have done alone.

Schedule time to chat Bring it to your team

Reading, not stats

  1. OpenAI, Sycophancy in GPT-4o. Supports item 01, It will tell you you’re right.

  2. OpenAI, Why Language Models Hallucinate. Supports item 02, It predicts. It doesn’t know.